Memes in Canadian Politics

Call for submissions. Deadline: 31 October 2021.

We invite you to submit entries to the Great Canadian Encyclopedia of Political Memes. Entries will focus on a single meme and its relevance to the 44th Canadian election. The entry is a chance to explain if and how memes mattered in #elxn44. You might select an example because you think it:

• exemplifies the type of content shared in your sample,
• influenced a party’s brand during the election,
• framed an election issue,
• was popular or shared a lot,
• transgressed community values or norms,
• connected different communities in important ways (from fringe to mainstream), or
• iterated on the meme or memetic style in a distinct way.

Submissions should include:

• A copy of the meme and related memes or party images
• A description of the image and its relation to a meme found on Know Your Meme or party brand
• The context / place you encountered it in or where you want to situate the meme
• An analysis of the visual argument of the meme:
  • Analysis can focus on images as arguments, the meme’s agenda-setting function, policy dramatization, emotional appeal, image building for candidates, creating identification, connection to societal symbols, audience transportation, and ambiguity; or, in relation to brands, mediatization, mis/disinformation, or memetic theory.

Submissions should be 750–1,000 words in length. In writing your submission, please use the existing entries on the 43rd election’s memes as a reference.

Important: Before submitting your entry, please contact Fenwick McKelvey (email: fenwick-dot-mckelvey-at-concordia-dot-ca) with your preferred meme to ensure there is no duplication. Include “GCEM” in the subject line. Approved submissions can be emailed to the same address.

By Scott DeJong

COVID-19 information is often described as an “infodemic” — a tidal wave of news good and bad. Political cartoonist Graeme Mackay played with this metaphor in his political cartoon from 11 March 2020 (Figure 1)*. The cartoon lent itself to being memed and by tracing its iteration, we can understand how discourse has evolved between partisans during the summer of the pandemic. 

The cartoon resembles a template for object labelling memes. These memes place text on parts of an image to recontextualize it and show relationships between ideas. In this case, a larger wave looming behind the first readily sets the meme up for other interpretations, both serious and humorous. As it was popularized, the template was quickly altered: the Canadian context was removed and the waves were re-labelled as other issues (Figure 2).

In our sample, the conservative-leaning groups were largely content with the cartoon’s original message and typically retained the two waves with their respective labels, i.e. COVID-19 followed by recession. However, the left-leaning pages brought in new arguments by adjusting the template and adding new waves. 

Left-leaning partisans first added a third green wave with the label  “climate change”, thereby positioning the impacts of global warming as an even greater threat than an economic recession or COVID-19 (Figure 3). While we are unsure of exactly where the meme originated, it gained considerable traction within our pro-NDP and pro-liberal meme pages and has become a commonly reposted meme within the comments section and across different Social Media platforms even beyond the Canadian context. 

By adding a climate change focused wave, partisans pushed a narrative that critiqued the cartoon’s original message that presented an economic recession as the primary concern. For many meme posters, COVID-19 represents a threat but they strive to look ahead, not (only) to the recession but to the impacts of climate change. They argue that large cultural, economic, and social shifts are necessary to mitigate or hopefully even reverse the negative environmental impacts we are witnessing across the globe. Proponents of this narrative also claim that the importance of combating climate change does not only outweigh concerns about the recession but that climate change mitigation needs to be prioritized in the policies put in place to deal with the economic impacts of the pandemic.

While it seemed that many posters thought that climate change would be the penultimate wave, mid-July brought in a fourth wave: a larger black wave initially labelled “biodiversity collapse” (Figure 3). This wave maintained the theme of the climate change discussion, but pointed to even graver outcomes of this threat. In this manner, each wave behind the other points to a less immediate but larger issue, something the visual nature of the cartoon readily provides.

The possible collapse of biodiversity wasn’t the only message though. Other posters opted to make the fourth wave more relevant to the current political moment. Based off of Kanye West’s announcement and short-lived run in the American Election, one commenter relabelled the fourth wave as “Kanye,” (Figure 4), mocking the rapper-cum-politician’s brief foray into the 2020 election (Rolli, 2020), While a Kanye West presidential campaign and a biodiversity collapse are of course entirely different arguments, both used the same meme template. This exemplifies how  templates can be recontextualized to make arguments about a wide variety of issues, and put different spins on the original message of the meme. In this case, the template allows meme makers to rank issues they consider less important or more urgent concerns.

Unexpectedly, the meme transformed again, moving beyond the typical wave format. Individuals “deep fried” the template (Kowalchuk, 2018), adding in visual cues that addressed the repeated expansion of the meme’s scope and commented on the arguments that were developing. In this case, they took a three-part image that showed the meme’s progression with additional waves being included, and placed an overly filtered comet on it which they labelled “Heat death of the universe” (Figure 5). Deep fried memes typically make an ironic argument about the overall trajectory of a meme template. In this case, the deep fried meme suggests that there are always impending dangers that supersede others. This final iteration is taking the argument to the extreme as a way to poke fun at the ever-growing number of waves that seem to suggest that the world is simply doomed. 

Conclusion
Tracing the transition of the template from March to late July illustrates the changing arguments and concerns that different groups had during the pandemic as well as the habits of meme-making. Initially, COVID-19 was outweighed by a looming economic recession. However, climate change soon became the “third wave” quickly followed with an array of fourth waves. Importantly, this meme was picked up and used beyond our sample where the waves were re-written as a variety of different things. However, the use of this template within our partisan groups emphasizes how political arguments, ideas, and cultural events get picked up in partisan meme-making. Finally, within our sample, the final format of the meme was a meta analysis of the format, arguing that the impending heat death of the universe supersedes the other concerns that people hold towards COVID-19 or any other impending tidal waves. The “Heat Death of the Universe” is so far beyond the meme’s initial scope that it offers a critical argument about the legitimacy of all of the claims, while being self-reflexive in the process and development of meme creation.

*Mackay’s initial cartoon first appeared as a political cartoon in the Hamilton Spectator, acting as a critique about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures set in place. It posited that Canadians should be on the lookout for the economic consequences related to the pandemic, not just the pandemic itself. Political cartoons are considered historic predecessors to object labelling memes (KnowYourMeme.com, 2020).

References

KnowYourMeme.com. (2020). Object Labeling. Know Your Meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/object-labeling

Kowalchuk, S. (2018, October 11). “Deep Fried” and Denaturalized: Critiquing Memetic Meta-Ontologies. Memeologies. Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Rolli, B. (2020, July 07). Kanye West’s 2020 Presidential Run Is Just His Latest Outrageous Promotional Stunt. Retrieved August 07, 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrolli/2020/07/05/kanye-west-2020-presidential-run-promotional-stunt/

By Saskia Kowalchuk

Lately, Canadian political memes on all sides have been focused on systemic racism. Since global protests supporting Black Lives Matter began, we observed a shift away from pandemic-related content to posts discussing systemic racism in Canada, mass protests, and police violence. This shift in focus has proven more dramatic and sustained than any we have seen so far.

Groups once talking about toilet paper hoarding, health workers’ pay, or Justin Trudeau’s “speaking moistly” (Figs. 1, 2 & 3), now focus on Black Lives Matter and acknowledge the specific context and implications of systemic racism in Canada. Typically, Canadian discussions have focused on the United States’ record of systemic racism, which has cultivated ignorance of our own history and current reality. The meme in Figure 4 mocks this tendency. This and other memes aim to stimulate conversation on the link between our legacy of colonialism and racially motivated police violence. As we have learned from writers including Eve Tuck (2012), Robyn Maynard (2017), and Desmond Cole (2020), Canada has its own history of anti-Black racism that must be understood alongside ongoing genocide and disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples in Canada (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada) et al., 2019).

While some might be quick to label this conversation as divided along partisan lines, the discourse has found broad engagement. Though right-leaning pages are more reticent to acknowledge anti-Black racism, meme pages on both the left and the moderate right posted the meme in Figure 4, hinting that awareness of Canada’s ongoing violent colonial actions is not a partisan position. In fact, we are observing a definitive anti-police sentiment across our partisan pages.

Most saliently, these groups engage with the hypocrisy when protests about police violence led to further police violence. Despite this similarity in overall sentiment, partisan groups have differences in what parts of the issue they most care about. Right-leaning pages, while critical of police violence, are less likely to address issues of race, and, while in support of change, are not in support of defunding the police: a rhetoric commonly found on the left-leaning pages we are following. Importantly, their willingness to engage in memeing about anti-state violence demonstrates a point of convergence among ostensible ideological opposites. However, this does not mean that these positions are uncontroversial. Pages and their audiences sometimes disagree, such as the case of one commenter reacting to the @canadianlibertarians post (Fig. 5) saying “is this a joke??” 

Left-leaning sites, particularly pro-NDP pages, share memes in support of direct action. While this can not be equated with a wholesale endorsement of violence or damage to property, it does demonstrate a willingness to consider a wider range of protest tactics than other groups. Memes shared by the pages such as Figures 6 and 7 are attempts to demonstrate the validity of such actions given the context of their deployment. Calls for “taking the anger out at the voting booth” have been wholly rebuked, as in Figure 8. This skepticism for the efficacy of elected officials has extended to the Prime Minister himself. Justin Trudeau joined a Black Lives Matter demonstration at Parliament Hill on June 6th and took a knee alongside protesters (Asmelash, 2020). This gesture drew the ire of partisans across the board (Tasker, 2020). Many drew comparisons to his participation in the Montreal Climate March in September 2019, as both incidents were seen as largely empty actions devoid of the will to implement meaningful change.

Memes related to the Black Lives Matter protests differ in style to past memes. Unlike COVID-19 memes, which attempted to stay somewhat lighthearted in tone, they strike a balance between seriousness out of respect for the victims of police violence and humorous recognizable meme formats to maintain visibility. Our observations noted that some posts aim to educate the audience about the specificities of police violence in Canada, particularly those which use news stories as an example, such as in the case of D’Andre Campbell (Kelley & Syed, 2020). These posts flouted the normal aesthetic considerations of visual internet vernacular in favour of novel or proprietary styles, as seen in Figure 9 — perhaps as an attempt to distance the serious subject matter from any possible humorous readings, as traditionally dank meme formats are embedded within humorous contexts and provide ample creative possibilities for reproduction (Literat & Berg, 2019). 

The progressive third party North99 has demonstrated through their Instagram pages that they are particularly adept at wielding visuals that do not adhere to standard meme aesthetics. These graphics are designed to quickly and decisively inform their audience on the chosen issue. These often include citations and highlighted keywords to allow for easy understanding of the issue at hand, with the added confidence of trusted sources (see Figure 9).

Interestingly, discussions of the coronavirus have not been jettisoned entirely from our pages. Many commenters have brought the issue of transmission to the forefront on posts about protests, while the pages and groups themselves have pointed to the need to protest structural racism in this moment, given that it links racially motivated police brutality and the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on BIPOC communities (Robinson & Nnorom, 2020). Despite expert evidence that the protests have not made a major impact on the transmission of the virus (Law, 2020), some memes have identified the demonstrations as hypocrisy of the highest order and blamed them for the oft-mentioned coming “second-wave.” 

As June has come and gone we are observing a gradual dwindling of Black Lives Matter and anti-police meme posting. However, the legacy of this period will remain within these communities. As each page has interpreted the events of the past month for their audience, many have deepened existing ideological coalitions and forged new ground. Whether this period brings about tangible change within Canadian institutions remains to be seen. However, it will undoubtedly be remembered alongside other moments of intense upheaval which mark a turning point in public opinion. Moreover, it has affirmed that memes are not merely frivolous images, but are capable of discussing important topics with wit and candor. 

References 

Asmelash, L. (2020, June 6). Justin Trudeau takes a knee at Black Lives Matter demonstration on Parliament Hill. CNN.

Cole, D. (2020). The skin we’re in: A year of black resistance and power. Doubleday Canada.

Law, T. (2020, June 30). Nationwide Protests Haven’t Caused a COVID-19 Spike (So Far). Time.

Maynard, R. (2017). Policing black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present. Fernwood Publishing.

National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada), Buller, M., Audette, M., Eyolfson, B., & Robinson, Q. (2019). Reclaiming power and place: The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Robinson, A., & Nnorom, O. (2020, June 11). How does systemic racism predispose people to COVID-19? | CBC Radio. CBC.

Tasker, J. P. (2020, June 8). Scheer says people are “upset and confused” by Trudeau’s decision to attend a protest during the pandemic | CBC News. CBC.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630

By Scott DeJong

The tidal wave of information that came crashing alongside COVID-19 has become known as the ‘infodemic’ (Mina, 2018; United Nations, 2020; Zarocostas, 2020). One of the many concerns connected to the pandemic was the extensive sharing of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Social media sites have tried to respond, with giants like Facebook attempting to combat the misinformation that is running rampant on their platforms (Jin, 2020). Others, like fact checking service snopes.com, have been tirelessly addressing misleading posts and articles that are coming across people’s screens (Echter, 2020). 

Memes are no exception to these issues. Using templates that recontextualize images from popular culture, meme makers have exploited the meme format to propel narratives that might be misleading or downright incorrect (Castañeda Jr, 2020; Motta et al., 2020; Smith & Graham, 2019). While sometimes grouped together under the concept of fake news, researchers distinguish between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation when considering non-factual information circulating online. According to Wardle and Derakshan (2016), “misinformation is information that is false, but the person who is disseminating it believes that it is true [while] disinformation is information that is false, and the person who is disseminating it knows it is false.” (p. 44). Finally, malinformation is, “information that is based on reality, but used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country.” (ibid. p.44). Knowing the difference between these terms helps us understand how memes act within the infodemic space.

Mis-, dis-, and malinformed memes

In our sample, some pages adopted a sceptical, or even oppositional, stance to stay-at-home orders and the threat of COVID-19. The most common concerns that were embedded in these memes revolved around the economic impacts of the pandemic and government power. While these concerns might be valid, they are quickly coupled with unverified claims that question the validity of news reporting about the novel coronavirus and subsequently downplayed concern for COVID-19. 

Memes with unsubstantiated rumors about the nature of a public health crisis run the risk of being exploited for detrimental claims about the appropriate medical response. Milner and Philips (2017) argue that memes encourage quick audience participation, which over time can expand and invite users to participate in a meme group. Over time, users can become more agreeable to the content that is shared in the groups they are part of. Other studies have furthered these claims, such as work by Smith and Graham (2019) which discusses how users in anti-vaccination groups engage in a variety of content across similar pages, making them more susceptible and agreeable to the proposed content. Critically, meme content is posted without citations or references provided to substantiate claims (see Figure 1). In this manner, memes can act as ways to engage the community on a page, where other content and material can further complement misleading memetic messages.

Our findings resonated with a recent study by Brennen et al. (2020) which found misinformation about the coronavirus circulating as “reconfigured content” where “true information is spun, twisted, recontextualized, or reworked” (Wardle 2019 as referenced in Brennen et al. 2020). They argue that reconfigured content has “higher engagement than content that was wholly fabricated” (Ibid.). Our current findings echo this claim. However, this creates a challenge in ascertaining if the memes creators are intentionally doing this (disinformation) or if they are spreading information they think is true (misinformation).

Memes, as Joan Donovan (2019) explains, have been taken up alongside propaganda initiatives where a “kernel of truth” makes it easier to pull off hoaxes through public sharing of content. For instance in Figure 1, while digital contact tracking by governments is a legitimate privacy concern, this image of Trudeau was posted on meme pages alongside text that implies a Liberal hidden agenda to surveil Canadian citizens while simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of the carbon tax. Figure 2 provides another example, placing the risk of COVID-19 on a pedestal below a mix of other legitimate health concerns and jokes from the hit show Tiger King. The meme presents true health issues in the form of a joke that attempts to dismiss the threat of the virus. 

Generally, memes are being presented without sources, which makes their message hard to check for some users. Rather, the meme’s rhetoric becomes consistent with the meme page they were posted on. As Figure 1 and Figure 2 show in their discussion on surveillance or delegitimizing COVID-19, their goals are intentional. The page’s goals for posting content alongside twisted and reconfigured memes (Brennen et al., 2020), would classify these memes as disinformation sources. This finding matches with other scholars (Brennen et al.; Castañeda Jr, 2020) and reinforce the importance of following memes as communication mediums. While some of the anti-Trudeau pages that we track might also come close to malinformation by intentionally presenting incorrect statements about Trudeau, the majority of content we examined appears to be disinformation.

Conspiracy

In some cases, disinformation expands into conspiracy, where issues of public concern are presented alongside conspiratorial claims. As exemplified by Figure 4, such memes casually further conspiracy theories around e.g. “mind control” and “5g causing cancer” by placing them alongside legitimate concerns about wealth inequality and poverty. According to a study from Reuters, this interplay of accurate and inaccurate information is commonplace as it obscures the difference between fact and fiction (Brennen et al., 2020).

We are finding evidence to support the claim made by Motta et al. (2020) that right-leaning groups have been more active in the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 than liberal or left-leaning ones.  In our sample, we have found that statements which delegitimize news sources or push conspiracy narratives only appear on two of our tracked meme pages.

As the above memes show, these pages present a narrative that accuses the media of having  ‘created’ the pandemic (Figures 3 and 5) and of overplaying the virus’ severity, therefore allegedly proving that they are unreliable sources of information. For instance, the upper panel of Figure 5 references a scene from “The Matrix” where individuals are offered a red or blue pill, a popular right-wing reference that has been recently picked up by pro-Bernier groups around making themselves “aware” of “mainstream media lies”. This is juxtaposed with a lower panel image of Michael Scott, the protagonist of television sitcom “The Office”, whose characteristic buffoonery is meant to support the meme’s overall message. 

However, it is important to note that conspiracy is still discussed on pro-Liberal and pro-NDP pages. But instead of supporting them, the pages posted memes which mock the conspiracy theories that are circulating in right-wing memespace. During the middle of May, when discussion about the pandemic was at its highest, the pages shared memes which made fun of certain conspiracy groups (Figures 6 and 7). Many of their memes referred to so-called Malthusian theory about population growth and control.

Conclusion

Our preliminary findings suggest that creating and sharing memes is a communicative practice whereby pro-Bernier groups gradually integrate conspiracy theories about COVID-19 into their memetic repertoire. While these groups also shared text and screenshots of news articles with captions that aimed to support their claims, memes contained the majority of misinformation or conspiracy claims. This reminds us of the possibilities of visual arguments to create relationships and connections. As our current findings show, memes provide an approachable template for discussing ideas and presenting opinions, including conspiracy theories. The meme groups we are tracking have used this to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy, especially discrediting Canadian news outlets in order to support alternative agendas. Meme’s generate conversation, which is picked up by other pages who react to popular ideas that are being discussed on meme groups across the Canadian political spectrum. This disparity in dialogue across meme groups, emphasizes the importance of following memetic conversations and the variety of opinion being taken up around different issues, whether it is true or false.

References

Brennen, S., Simon, F., Howard, P., & Nielson, R. (2020). Types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Castañeda Jr, J. (2020). Memes of Misinformation: Federal Spending: Unraveling the controversial, socio-economic and political issues behind those annoying social media memes. Vernon Press.

Milner, R. M., & Phillips, W. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity.

Mina, N. G., An Xiao. (2018, August 30). How Misinfodemics Spread Disease. The Atlantic.

Motta, M., Stecula, D., & Farhart, C. (2020). How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423920000396

Smith, N., & Graham, T. (2019). Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 22(9), 1310–1327. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406

United Nations. (2020). UN tackles ‘infodemic’ of misinformation and cybercrime in COVID-19 crisis. United Nations; United Nations.

Wardle, C. (2016, November 18). 6 types of misinformation circulated this election season. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/6_types_election_fake_news.php

Zarocostas, J. (2020). How to fight an infodemic. The Lancet, 395(10225), 676. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30461-X